The July issue of the Physics Today magazine has the theme of “Energy today and tomorrow.” While access to most of the articles on-line requires a subscription, two of them can be accessed for free at Physics Today. These are “Home photovoltaic systems for physicists” and “Education for the global energy challenge.”
Physics Today lies somewhere between peer reviewed journals and magazines such as Scientific American. It provides news about physics and physics education, and generally has three main articles of good quality. It is a publication of the American Institute of Physics.
There are other energy related articles that I will summarize in this diary, but the main motivation for this diary is to provide information from this issue about a new on-line energy research journal. The journal will be described after the jump, and then I will add summaries of some of the energy related articles in the July issue of Physics Today.
The new American Institute of Physics Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy is announced on page 27. It is further described on page 41 with a call for papers. This new on-line journal
… will cover everything from biofuels to wind and waves to fission and fusion.
It will be a peer-reviewed publication. It
… opens for submissions on 1 August, and the first articles will be published this fall.
The reason that I’m bringing this up is the following:
Access will be free in 2009 and by subscription in 2010.
More details and updates will be available at jrse.
I’m planning on taking advantage of the free subscription and may keep subscribing if the information proves to be useful to me as a physics teacher and workshop presenter. Those of you who are concerned about the energy and climate future of our world may find this worth looking into. At least it is good to know that the American Institute of Physics, the premier organization of physicists in this country (with international membership), is taking these problems seriously.
On pages 19, 20 and 22 of the Physics Today issue there’s a news item titled,
DOE urged to proceed more deliberately with global plan to expand nuclear power.
This is about a 2006 initiative by the U.S. to create a world organization called the “Global Nuclear Energy Partnership” (GNEP). This has the goals
… of spreading nuclear energy generation throughout the world while preventing the spread of technologies needed to manufacture and recycle nuclear fuel to nations that don’t already possess them.
One of the reasons for GNEP is to provide electrical energy without significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions. It would require nations that don’t already have their own fuel processing or reprocessing capabilities to not develop them and to return spent-fuel to the United States or other nations that can supply or reprocess fuel.
One controversial aspect is the proposal for the construction of fast neutron burner reactors. These would produce electrical power while also transmuting long half-life isotopes of the actinides so as to reduce the amount of radioactive waste products. The result would be that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository could store all of the nuclear waste produced in this century.
The idea behind this isn’t new. Radioactive nuclear waste is produced in today’s nuclear reactors, but additional nuclear reactions could be used to change radioactive nuclei into other stable nuclei. In principle we even know how to do this now. In practice all the parts of the technology needed to do this haven’t been worked out completely.
Consequently, much of this article is about the pros and cons of proceeding with this part of the GNEP program. The original plan was for the formation of a design and construction study by the end of this year, but Congress hasn’t budgeted enough money for this to happen, and it seems unlikely that it will go forward soon.
Outside reviewers have suggested that the timetable for this initiative is too fast because it depends on unproven technologies. One group recommends that it would be more productive to assist utilities with the construction of advanced light-water reactors.
While I find the idea of the burner reactor intriguing, one statement in the article reduced my enthusiasm for it. That is that
An initial burner reactor could be built by 2025, although one study suggests it’s likely to be mid-century before commercial versions are in operation.
This is simply too late to be of much help with either the generation of electrical energy or the reduction in greenhouse gas production. Of course advanced light-water reactors could be constructed much sooner in the anticipation of the burner reactors coming on line later, but that would be assuming that an untested technology will work on a sure timetable.
Reprocessing is being done now in France, the UK and Russia. The article says that this adds 6% to the cost of nuclear power in France. But France, which generates 78% of it’s electrical power with nuclear reactors and is a net exporter of electrical power, has the lowest electrical rates in Europe.
Overall it seems that France has shown that nuclear power is a viable large-scale option if other approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions take longer to mature than expected.
According to a short news item on pages 25 and 26, at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) the “stellarator,” a magnetic confinement fusion geometry different from the better known “tokamak,” has lost funding and will be mothballed due to cost overruns.
I’ve been to the PPPL a few times and know that they have good researchers and an excellent educational outreach program on fusion and plasma physics. Even with the cost overruns, it seems to me that in this time of energy uncertainty we could have come up with the money to continue this experiment. The discrepancy is only in the tens of millions of dollars.
The article, “Grand challenges in basic energy sciences,” is about advancing research at the microscopic through atomic levels to address the issue of sustainable energy generation. Apparently we are likely to find ways to improve efficiencies in the use and control of energy by developing new materials and processes and by advancing the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
The authors propose that the Department of Energy adopt the following approach:
• A DOE energy institute, to support creativity and accomplishment by the most promising and productive researchers.
• An energy sciences study group, to approach problems requiring science and technology to meet energy-security challenges
• A DOE fellows program, to train and inspire young scientists.
I’m all for it.
The article, “Energy efficiency in the built environment,” is about improving energy efficiency in buildings. It indicates that buildings in the United States use 39% of the total energy consumed here and that this is the largest of the three main energy sectors. The others are transportation and industry.
I’ve seen estimates of the percentage of energy use by buildings that are slightly higher than this. In any case the energy sector of buildings is a major energy user, and there are big opportunities to improve efficiencies in this sector.
In particular it is stated that
The American Institute of Architects has a goal of achieving, by the year 2010, a minimum 50% reduction from the current level of consumption of fossil fuels used to construct and operate new and renovated buildings.
Elsewhere I’ve seen the goal of making all new buildings carbon neutral by 2050 or earlier.
The article has a chart on page 37 in which electrical power costs are compared against the cost of conservation in what are called “advanced buildings.” The later cost is given as zero to 6 cents/KW-hour. This is a lower cost than any of the costs listed from either “Conventional technology” or “Renewable technology.”
We know how to reduce energy usage in buildings while improving the internal environment now, and we can even save money in doing it. What’s preventing this from being done with every new building and renovation? The answer in the article is that
The building industry is very conservative.
In physics terms we could say that there is a lot of inertia in the system, and it will take external forces to change how things are done. This is where letters to your state and federal representatives and senators can make a difference. We can also all insist on advanced construction of any buildings that we will have constructed or that we will be working in. E.g., it is likely that one or two new buildings will be constructed for the school where I teach, and many of us are asking for results that will be as close to carbon neutral as we can get.
I just want to emphasize once again that, while automobile efficiency is getting the most public attention, the potential payoff in better building construction and renovation is much higher and much easier to attain.
The article, “Home photovoltaic systems for physicists,” describe in some detail the installation of photovoltaic panels at the house of the author. This article is available on line from the link given above, and it’s for those with the electrical and construction skills needed to make such installations yourselves. It looks like more than I’m ready to do, but good luck to those who have what it takes.
The final energy article is an opinion piece titled, “Education for the global energy challenge.” The authors, Roel Snieder and Sally M. Benson, have a PowerPoint presentation that they use with high school and college students. It is available through their web site at Global Energy Challenge. There’s a lot of good stuff at that site. Take a look even if you’re not going to present slides.
The article also has a chart showing the cost as a function of carbon dioxide emissions avoided in the United States. This chart goes well with the previous article in the magazine. It shows in particular that the cost of the first 1.5 gigatons avoided per year is negative! I.e., we can reduce emissions by this much while saving money – a lot of money! After that with existing technology, there are increasing costs for avoiding additional emissions. However, we already have the ability to avoid up to 3 gigatons of emissions per year at zero net cost, when the savings for the first half of this 3 gigatons are included.
Obviously, with continuing research into sustainable energy generation, we can do better in the future.
Overall, I found some reason for optimism in reading this issue of Physics Today. The catch is that it describes what we can do but not exactly what we are doing. To minimize the current double crisis of energy shortages and greenhouse gas emissions requires effort on our parts, but the combination of things that we know how to do now plus continuing research provides some hope that we can prevent the worst from happening.
At this point I should say that I have two conflicting tendencies. One is that I sometimes get carried away by optimism based on what can be done. The other is that, with my education being in science, I tend to be highly critical of any new idea that I hear about. The later tells me that most of the ways that have been and will be advanced to solve our problems won’t work. The former tells me that, if we care enough, we can get some of these approaches to work before too may tipping points have passed.
One thing that is needed perhaps more than anything else is education for the future. While there have been many new approaches to education in recent decades, schools are often still organized as if to produce factory workers, and much of education in practice is still based on what Karl Popper called “bucket theory.” I.e., the mind is like a bucket into which the teacher pours knowledge.
Of course we know that the brain doesn’t work that way, and our teaching should better reflect how it does work. In particular education for the future should be consistent with the natural development of creativity in the individual. Schools based on factory models destroy this creativity. That’s exactly what we don’t need in this time of multiple crises.
With better educational practices and more emphasis on living in ways that are sustainable, we can begin to solve our worst problems. Let’s get started.